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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/879-2/
All my reviews of Bowen novels will be linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/elizabeth-bowens-novels/
All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My gestalt real-time review will be conducted in the comment stream below:
All my reviews of Bowen novels will be linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/elizabeth-bowens-novels/
All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My gestalt real-time review will be conducted in the comment stream below:
CHAPTER ONE
“….emptiness the music had not had time to fill. […] This Sunday on which the sun set was the first Sunday of September 1942.”
We get to know things about Louie Lewis (of course) and the nameless man she meets by chance in Regent’s Park outdoor concert (that extends into dusk) and why their paths cross there and later uncross, she with her husband Tom at war, and memories of an airman, another nameless man (if my memory does not now play me false) who tickled her and thumbed her elbow earlier, and her childhood backstory at Seale on Sea (“once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea.”) — a seaside place that reminds me of Portia and that I must not now go to town with my deployment of this classic first chapter of this classic novel as fulsomely as I recently did with the whole of the serial public account of my experience of The Death of the Heart…
I shall try to keep things shorter here, having just been swept away by the description of the music in the park and the nature of it massed audience, a concert eventually in the dark, plus the ambiance of the cigarette manipulations and the bodily minutiae, and not the detailed backstories of the two characters so much as ‘ghosty’ (sic) sidestories. Potential elbowstories, too?
And I have already forgotten what I learnt about the nameless man and what path he was already on (other than he was off to meet a woman and had sat down in the park to listen to the music and to gather his thoughts about the impending meeting). But I seem to already know so much more about the woman surnamed Lewis….
Just to report that this chapter’s overall info-secretion as opposed to its info-dump shifted and feinted with each character, at some points gruff and surly on his part, at other points pushy or flighty on her part. Flighty because of the earlier airman whom we heard about her canoodling with in a rose garden? Or flighty because of the untethered barrage balloon Louie points out in the park to the new nameless man. Or was he named? I forget again.
*
“This man’s excessive stillness gave the effect not of abandon but of cryptic behaviour. He sat body bent forward, feet planted apart on the grass floor, elbows lodged on his knees, insistently thrusting the fist of his right hand against and into the open palm of his left.”
“ – one of his eyes either was or behaved as being just perceptibly higher than the other. This lag or inequality in his vision gave her the feeling of being looked at twice – being viewed then checked over again in the same moment.”
“….his nose was bony; he wore a close-clipped little that-was-that moustache.”
“This was a face with a gate behind it –“
“She could be felt to falter behind the barricade; and the programme, let go of by her as though incriminated, fluttered to the ground.”
“The futility of the heated inner speed, the alternate racing to nowhere and coming to dead stops, made him guy himself.”
“She had never had any censor inside herself, and now Tom her husband was gone – he was in the Army – she had no way of knowing if she were queer or not.”
“Louie had, with regard to time, an infant lack of stereoscopic vision; she saw then and now on the same plane; they were the same. To her everything seemed to be going on at once;”
“To this spot, to which Tom had been so much attached, a sort of piety made her bring any other man: she had thus the sense of living their Sundays for him.”
“There is a freedom about an outdoor concert: you come or go at will –“
As one does with Bowen.
Time stood still, as I re-read, after many forgotten years, this, yes, this greatest opening chapter of any novel.
CHAPTER TWO
“He was as a rule punctual, wheeling in on the quiver of the appointed hour as though attached to the very works of the clock.”
Stella Rodney, fiddling with the acorns of a blackout-blind cord (a cord that later leaves a “red spiral weal” on her finger), wields the many low-level machinations and procedures and unlatched rituals of waiting, in her upstairs fiat in an otherwise empty building, for an uwelcome visitor, a man she seems to know as Harrison (who, I, for one, guess, has just listened to the park’s band with a female stranger called Lewis)… followed by the equally subtle machinations of two photographs in her Bowenesquely ready-furnished flat (one photo of her 20 year old son Roderick who pre-warns her at the end of this chapter by telephone that he is about to arrive in a surprise visit, and the second photo of a man called Robert Kelway), plus the machinations of the surrounding war, and the rituals of cigarette smoking and ash trays with Harrison who has come here with espionage or counter-espionage proposals regarding Kelway in the context of various backstories, Stella’s with a secret Y.X.D. complex worthy of a Brutt puzzle, Harrison’s backstory, Kelway’s biackstory, too, and the shadowy thirds of emotional relationship between them, one being a spy to be kept going or ditched, incriminating him or not, him- or herself in the game of war and scrying the pre-warned shifting of motives… You will of course know already this famous chapter but I am particularly intrigued in its explicit ‘being watched’ aspects, and whether this novel, now being watched with more substance by myself, now actually being enabled to recreate the book in the actual reading of it by means of a gestalt real-time review, and whether I should welcome its own complicit revisit to my already unlatched back door of a brain… or not.
“As one does when thinking about an enemy, she endowed him with subtleties which, in his case, on second thoughts, were unlikely.”
“…thus it was left to him to make his own way in, unmet half way,…”
“Silence mounted the stairs, to enter her flat through the door ajar; silence came through the windows from the deserted street. In fact, the scene at this day and hour could not have been more perfectly set for violence –“
“Nature had kindly given her one white dash, lock or wing in otherwise tawny hair; and that white wing, springing back from her forehead, looked in the desired sense artificial –“
“He, having settled with the door, looked at the carpet, at the distances of carpet between them, as though thinking out a succession of moves in chess.”
“Tightening her spreadout fingers above her elbows, she looked away from him at the windows across the street. […] She sat down on the stool by the escritoire, propping her elbow among the letters on the pulled-out flap.”
“His mind was, where she was concerned, a jar of opaquely clouded water, in which, for all she knew, the strangest fish might be circling, staring, turning to turn away.”
“How had he guessed her to be a woman with whom the unspecified threat would work?”
“In other words, this is a crooks’ war?”
Hesitating, he touched his moustache – as though it concealed a spring which could make his mouth fly open on something final. She
“We’ve traced a leak – shortly, the gist of the stuff he handles is getting through to the enemy. For a good bit of time this has been suspected; now it’s established, known.”
“I’ve never yet known a man not change his behaviour once he’s known he’s watched: it’s exactly changes like that that are being watched for. No, he’d let us know in an instant that he’d been tipped the wink: in which case, what? He’d be pulled in before anyone coud say knife, before he could tip the wink any further . . . I should not say anything to him if I were you.”
“Having shaken a loose sleeve back, she supported an elbow against the chimneypiece, a side of her face against the palm of a hand, and continued to study him, though vacantly. He, having come to one of those pauses in his fidgety smoking, slowly slid his hands down into his pockets.
‘And as far as we’re concerned,’ he said, ‘think it over.’
‘I’d never love you.’”
But this rapprochement in her flat between the two of them, ending with a possible irresistible kiss or, perhaps, a threatening embrace taking place amidst the shadowier thirds yet to be fathomed, shadowier even than this famous book itself could contain without having its rightful reader to wield them for the first time…
“….and it was as unnerving as might be a brain-storm in someone without a brain.”
CHAPTER THREE
“By every day, every night, existence was being further drained…[…]
– a mysterious flutter, like that of a fire burning, which used to emanate from the minutes seemed to be at a stop.”
This is London at war, structured into Stella’s tiny flat with a kitchenette, blackouted as equivalence with our lockdowned, as Stella and Roderick, when he arrived through a locked door, adjust their bodies, fat or thin, she as what? — he as young soldier as a contraption of bits and pieces, but a far more sensitive even autistic (?) lad, as well as adjusting their minds, mother and son. All couched in a tantalisingly elegant and poetic and truly felt stylishness that only Bowen can manage. London at war as a prophecy of its last two years in our own real-time, also London’s nature as a Mysterious Kôr… as they go to bed in separate tininesses …
“the watery circle on the ceiling seemed for the moment to swell or tremble – so earthquake stories begin; but this could be only London giving one of her sleepy galvanic shudders, of which an echo ran through his relaxed limbs.”
After much talk of Roderick’s unexpected Mount Morris house inheritance still being probated in Ireland, an inheritance through the backstory of his father (his mother’s once husband) and the piece of paper Roderick finds in the pocket of the silk dressing-gown that he borrow, a gown belonging to someone called Robert (the Kelway mentioned in the previous chapter who, I simply guess, rings Stella in the dying sleepy moments of this chapter) — a piece of paper that sort of presents a Major Brutt / Portia type puzzle for Stella, in the eyes of her son…
“Like an ignorant looker-on at some famous game, trying to grasp the score and get the hang of the rules, he was watching to see what she would now do…“
i.e. what she would do with the piece of paper?
Better absorb the tidal movements of this chapter before Bowen tears it up…
Firstly, my sort of Matchett monologue as reviewer
— Pyjamas Roderick’s tin hat and paraphernalia is his mother putting on weight home as story Robert’s silk dressing two rooms each the other room a sofa-boat ‘the spoor of habit’ a detective the armchairs ash tray who had been standing so long with so much ash corn on Roderick’s foot not frostbite rose petals manhandled Roderick’s commission not as forthcoming as that of his pal Fred…
“Had her parting with Harrison been of a different kind she would have called after him, as he went downstairs: ‘Please leave that door on the latch again, for Roderick!’ As things were, she had had the irritation of hearing Harrison pause outside, to make sure the door was shut, before making off down Weymouth Street. He had gone – but he had brought life to one of those passes when nothing is simple, not even opening a door.”
“It was a time of opening street doors conspiratorially: light must not escape on to steps.”
“Since he was seventeen, war had laid a negative finger on alternatives; […] Everybody was undergoing the same thing. The alternatives shadowed in Stella’s mind only troubled him in so far as they troubled her:”
“ … by geographically standing outside war it appeared also to be standing outside the present.”
“…refolded the dressing-gown round his body, built himself up an elbow rest of brocade cushions […]
Even the papers, letters, among which she had rested her elbow, listening to him, seemed to be contaminated;”
“His body could at least copy, if not at once regain, unsoldierly looseness and spontaneity. And he traced his way back by these attitudes, one by one, as though each could act as a clue or signpost to the Roderick his mother remembered, the Roderick he could feel her hoping to see.”
“As it was, the anomaly of her son’s looks made Stella no longer know where she was with him:”
“His motives were too direct to be called ulterior; he liked going out to tea with families who had a brook through their garden, hypothetical snakes in their uncut grass, collections of any kind in cabinets, a haunted room, a model railway, a funny uncle, a desk with a secret drawer. He attached himself to the children of such families in a flattering, obstinate, reserved way – you still could not, somehow, accuse him of cupboard love.”
“Every crack was stopped; not a mote of darkness could enter –“
CHAPTER FOUR
“Stella’s first view of him, glancing back, had been of someone stepping cranelike over the graves.”
Having just re-read it, I feel this may be my favourite ever Bowen chapter, so utterly compelling in its strange-storyish, borderline future Aickman-absurdist, way — and my wonderment at how any author could have conceived such a plot’s strange backstory and still allowed us readily to believe it all!
This is the funeral in the recent past of the man, Cousin Francis: who died ‘suddenly’ and unexpectedly left the Irish property to Roderick.
Francis had travelled from Eire to see his wife Nettie in a mental institution called Wistaria [sic] Lodge (or as Harrison called it, “a nut house”) in England, a place managed by a couple called Tringsby. To follow what I could make further clear here in my real-time review, it would be better for you to read the chapter itself, but just with a few passing comments below…
“…for by now the regulations affecting an Eire subject’s travel to England had been forbiddingly tightened up.”
Like our own days today, alongside, later, in this chapter:
“for ever-severer cuts in the train service so worked out that nobody could depart, on the up or down line,”
“The butcher flaunted unknown joints of purplish meat in the confidence that these could not be bought;” etc. etc.
And Francis died (by heart attack?) in the ‘nut house’ before seeing his wife in her room. But the fact Harrison was also at the funeral, an outsider, like Stella, ostracised by the rest of the family, enables him, as a mysterious stranger to everyone, to start grooming Stella, whose son is to be the beneficiary of the death, or does he do this grooming of her because he left some ‘papers’ with Francis whom he says he knew as a boy, and wants to get them back, and are they anything to do with the espionage machinations we already know about from the near future following this funeral?
At first Stella thinks Harrison most be another of the older mental patients invited to make up numbers, as the corpse could not be shipped back to Eire for a larger funeral because of the travel restrictions that we still suffer today…
“I took for granted you were a lunatic; and I am still not so certain that I was wrong.”
“Stella had on the whole been grateful for the diversion Harrison’s presence caused. For her, the day had not been an easy one; it involved, as well as the train journey to this old-world nucleus of a new dormitory town, the presenting of some sort of face to her once relations-in-law. She had not seen any of them, they had not seen her, since the disastrous end of her short marriage;”
“Cousin Francis’s death from a heart-attack at Wistaria Lodge could hardly have given more trouble: everything had had to be hushed up. It could have endangered the equilibrium of Dr and Mrs Tringsby’s six tranquil uncertified mental patients, of whom Nettie Morris, the dead man’s wife, was one.”
“Mrs Tringsby so far rallied herself as to telephone to the florist’s for a beautiful wreath – which Cousin Nettie must send but not be allowed to see. Mrs Tringsby inscribed the card with:
‘From his loving wife
Till the day break
and the shadows flee away’.”
“His [Francis’s] real object in making the journey to England had been to offer that country his services in the war – his own country’s abstention had been a severe blow, but he had never sat down under a blow yet.”
“Several heads half-turned and at the half-turn paused.”
when Stella entered the church.
“One seemed to have left the churchyard with its alert headstones for a scene of less future, order, and animation.”
“; it was by the merest chance that she had not been left to walk quite alone – one of the Tringsby patients had drawn alongside, but he skipped on and off the pavement and did not speak. Trying to fight off the influence of the street and day and still more of the memory of the grave – on which, it seemed to her, they had so shamefacedly, hurriedly turned their backs – she supported herself by thinking about Robert. When the lawyer bowed at her elbow and said how much he regretted Roderick’s having been unable to come, she explained for the second time that he was in the Army.” (My bold)
“Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again. Her uncontrovertible sense of Harrison’s queerness dated, she saw ever afterwards, from that day of the funeral.”
“…he [the lawyer] took her to a recess under the stairs: surrounded by hanging macintoshes, he made known to her the effect of Cousin Francis’s will,…”
The hanging macintoshes reminded of much else in Bowen, including those in her Aickman-absurdist story called LOVE (‘…seeing “what looked like a row of corpses, all hanging along on the one wall. Later, I noticed these were gentlemen’s mackintoshes.’)
Wartime abstentions, notwithstanding.
“Any salesman would find him as easy to ‘interest’ as he would prove impossible to pin down. He could be written off as a famous waster of time.”
So more backstory regarding Colonel Pole about fireproof roofs et al. Wasting time also being significant to Bowen fiction.
“one would think twice these days about shipping a stiff to Ireland,”
Thus, Colonel Pole tries to groom Stella off Harrison, and he suggests the inherited property a ‘white elephant’ for Roderick….
“One thing he should do at once is take the roof off the house, or they’ll be popping nuns in before you can say knife. Tell him that from me.”
“Harrison’s case, whipped out just not in time, snapped shut again like the jaws of a chagrined crocodile…”
Bowen has many cigarette cases in her fiction.
Roderick later examines his legacy…
“Why must lawyers always take out commas?”
“One must not be too much influenced by a dead person!”
“Cousin Nettie went off her chump; Ireland refused to fight. But that’s not the same as to say he let himself down.”
Stella made some correction, I forget to whom, probably Harrison, which seems to predict Roderick later wearing Robert’s silk dressing-giwn, with another (significant?) paper left in its pocket… just as Harrison left ‘papers’, he says, with the now deceased Francis…
“‘However, your young Robert – ’
‘– Roderick,’ she impassively corrected.”
“But meanwhile the roof may fall in, or the trees blow down.”
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CHAPTER FIVE
“What the inheritance came to be for Roderick, Robert was for Stella – a habitat. The lovers had for two years possessed a hermetic world, which, like the ideal book about nothing, stayed itself on itself by its inner force.”
About nothing, about everything, as our once sunny uplands beyond the boundary rope of Europe, here become the “sunny emptiness on the other side” of where London’s buildings are blitzed into rubble, in that September and Autumn in 1940 wherein Stella and Robert first met.
From the previous chapter’s perfect sense of restrained absurdism to this chapter’s apotheosis of Bowen as well as love, poetry and death, and a comparison with our times today wherein we also float like shoals of the dead, a comparison that works except for one exception that proves the rule, an exception I shall come to at the end of the description of — and quotations below from — this greatest chapter in all literature, a chapter beyond the passion of other reading moments that I may have already dubbed as the greatest!
Amidst the ruins and the makeshift parties of the community of ‘stayers-on’ in London, Stella met Robert with his intrinsic Dunkirk limp, a limp that stems from his damaged knee, another hinge, another crook, another hook upon which to hang good and bad alike…
“…so deep a component of their intimacy that she wondered what, had they met before 1940, would have taken the place between them of his uncertain knee. The first few times they met she had not noticed the limp – or, if, vaguely, she had, she had put it down to the general rocking of London and one’s own mind.”
I feel the ground rocking beneath me, too, today, at least in my imagination.
Air raids and a love affair, poetry and death, tactile, sensory, all is here in dense passages of Proustian prose, clear and unclear alike like dispersing war smoke, and eventually becoming apotheosised as this chapter makes time stand still, with the Null Immortalis of Zeno’s Paradox then and still even now…
“Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence – not as today’s dead but as yesterday’s living – felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move in shoals through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected – for death cannot be so sudden as all that.”
“Who had the right to mourn them, not having cared that they had lived?”
“The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of their hearts.”
We have now felt it too, my generation and my generation’s generation below me, from those times now reached, reechoed….
“…each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown.”
“It was from this new insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial.”
“Everywhere hung the heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel.”
Face, hands, space…
“Faith came down to a slogan, desperately reworded to catch the eye, requiring to be pasted each time more strikingly…”
“: happy those who could draw from some inner source.”
That vaccination heaven?….
“So far, nothing had happened to anybody she knew, or even to anyone she knew knew – today, however, tingled all over from some shock which could be the breaking down of immunity.”
“…she threw away any time she had gained by standing still.”
“She had had the sensation of being on furlough from her own life.”
“The very temper of pleasures lay in their chanciness, in the canvas-like impermanence of their settings, in their being off-time – to and fro between bars and grills, clubs and each other’s places moved the little shoal through the noisy nights.”
“It was a characteristic of that life in the moment and for the moment’s sake that one knew people well without knowing much about them:”
The start of the Robert-Stella syndrome so startlingly conjured amidst this scenario…
“…for ever she was to see, photographed as though it had been someone else’s, her hand up. The bracelet slipping down and sleeve falling back,…”
To reveal what?
The near-distant thud of destruction that belied them here to match their later frozen cinema image, as absurdist as the previous chapter… (“He kept his thumb on his lighter. So in the cinema some break-down of projection leaves one shot frozen, absurdly, on to the screen.”)
“With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out;…”
And like the Brutt-Portia puzzle…
“Most first words have the nature of being trifling; theirs from having been lost began to have the significance of a lost clue.”
“Nothing but the rising exhilaration of kindred spirits was, after all, to immortalize for them those first hours:”
“The extraordinary battle in the sky transfixed them; they might have stayed for ever on the eve of being in love.”
“…her wrist watch seemed to belie time; she fancied it had lost hours during the night,…”
“…over the borderline of fiction – so much so that, making her way thither, she felt herself to be going to a rendezvous inside the pages of a book. And was, indeed, Robert himself fictitious?”
“To miss from his eyes, mouth, forehead the knowable unguarded play of his nature was for her, for the first time, to be made feel its force. In the unfamiliar the familiar persisted like a ghost –“
“The gilt-faced clock in the sunburst on the restaurant’s wall had, like others in London, been shock-stopped.”
“…some kind of relationship of their own by never perfectly synchronizing –“
And so they progress imperfectly towards what happened ahead in the second and third chapters above…
“…from the rest so much that nothing was quite lost, little had gone to waste. His experiences and hers became harder and harder to tell apart; everything gathered behind them into a common memory –“
“…everything came to be woven into the continuous narrative of love; which, just as much, kept gaining substance, shadow, consistency from the imperfectly known and the not said. For naturally they did not tell one another everything.”
“– silence, when she and Robert came back together, stood storeys deep.”
“War time, with its makeshifts, shelvings, deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic love.”
And THAT, my friend, is the threatened exception to the rule of our own times!
Whereby we have been wearing face masks and socially distancing….?
[The chapter ends, with telling irony, by their concentrating on his tie and, less absurdistly, a proposed visit to see his parents in the country.]
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XXI
“‘I can’t imagine myself without you,’ said Emmeline. So they shelved America. It did strike Cecilia a moment that the idea of Emmeline’s imagining herself in any way, even to seeing her own shadow, was quite a new one. For she spoke of herself so little, as though she did not exist.”
A chapter as important as it is unimportant in a concomitant way. This being a crucial chapter in Bowen’s canon, one of decorative but vanishable objects and gift shop paraphernalia. Seen by Emmeline in the light or shadow of Markie, including his views on women’s careers. Almost a substance by default —
—as she returns from the Paris trip to find Lewis has rid the firm of Tripp!
“The little white house pale with dusk, with rain streaming down its windows, was friendly tonight; here day-to-day life presented itself in mild outline and, after Paris, in delicate low-relief. She longed to inhabit with Markie the heart of the country, inaccessible, green and quiet, where telephones were not and lovers’ meetings meant journeys. If they were to be little together they must be calmly apart.”
“Emmeline went to bed early; Cecilia read for a little and looked through her letters, staying to watch the fire die down. Restless, she crept up at midnight, tapped softly, and opened Emmeline’s door an inch. She heard rain on the window, the clock ticking, an unstirring silence about the bed … Sitting up by her shaded lamp Cecilia wrote, later, to Julian: ‘Emmeline’s home tonight; she is tired and doesn’t say much but seems quite happy: I regret, rather, anything that I said. Forget what I said: I don’t think I was anxious really. She says it was hot in Paris – think of heat while we were at Farraways! – She had a nice week-end and quite liked her Serbs. So what a pair of old women we were! […]
This morning, Pauline and I went out riding; she fell off but seemed to enjoy herself. She seems anxious to be affectionate, but can find no one she really likes. Though I always feel …’ She wandered on, concluding: ‘I may not post this,’ and she did not. Her desk was full of such letters addressed to such friends, even stamped. Wondering if they would be posted if she were dead, she did not destroy them.”
Unlike with spilt ink upon paper, one cannot destroy emails by retroactivity today amid the ‘moving dangerously’ fast of the Internet. But all is still subject to a Zeno Paradox, nevertheless? An intensely rainy London and an impending war that remind me of today’s recent lockdowns, lockdowns still possible, even now, in the ever-faraway post-omnicron’s near-future….
“However assiduous the umbrella or kind the unrolled carpet, thousands of pairs of pale slippers must have been spoilt that summer. […]
Across the mind’s surface – on which a world’s apprehension, strain at home and in Europe, were gravely written – the sense of a spoilt summer, so much prettiness wasted, darkly spread like spilt ink. Streets were to be navigated and parks desolate, pleasure-boats under tarpaulin and bands silent: the whole city became a mesh of unwilling hurry where nobody smiled or lingered. Unknown, the moon diminished; wasting itself upon vapours the sun smiled on.” [My bold]
The band in the park did eventually break out again later in the Heat of the Day, though…
But Lewis and Emmeline exploited the sticky situation at home with their ‘moving dangerously’ firm shipping people out from the rain elsewhere into the sun, a shifting by impossible flight, a feat that later becomes impossible in our own times through covid….
“The Summer Rush meant little to Markie, who rushed nowhere in summer: when she was late he was not patient. The more he possessed of Emmeline, the more he became exacting. The question of marriage, however, was not re-opened between them.”
The only real way to waste time, meantime, positively has been, during my own lockdowns, to sift Bowen’s canon — story by story, chapter by chapter, even increasingly if more intensely word by word…
“She could only conclude that he felt time wasted at all had better be wasted thoroughly, and to this end put a pretty high value upon fatuity.“
“…then they both dissipated and hung in the air. But still something restlessly ate up the air, like a flame burning.”
XXII
“High or low, drifting over the hours, iridescent or darker passing a shadow, she saw their happiness like an immortal bubble, touching a moment objects it seemed to enclose …”
That Null Immortalis…
“‘Nothing goes on,’ she said. ‘We grow old and don’t care, then we die: I don’t think it matters…”
A rarefied chapter as a post-Paris portrait of Markie and Emmeline, including her ability to turn a jewellery shop out with its range of pearl necklaces for her to choose from and, after much ado, leaving the shop with the chosen necklace, while saying – but I never wear pearls!
I feel likewise in scouring Bowen.
“Here figures cast unknown shadows;”
Through oblique glances of dialogue, that nobody would have spoken, we can choose those most important to represent the reluctant gestalt of the M.E. Syndrome. Him as an insurance company or a tall toppling tower, one who cannot live at the top of the Alps, and she a silently pent up volcano, I infer, a matched and unmatched couple that can only exist among the impossible choices of a hat shop called At El Bow’s…
“…her unconsciousness still had him wholly at its command. […]
…his fingers exploring the arm and shoulder so sensitive to his touch – if she ever could be. […]
….facing her round to him, held by the elbows, so close… […]
Tightening his grip on her elbows, he went on: ‘We do disagree.’
‘About everything, yes – stop, Markie, you’re hurting me rather – I don’t think that matters.’”
“While her passivity soothed him, an exaltation at all times latent in her regard and, so great a part of her passion, likely to spring out at any time, alarmed, irked and often fatigued him.”
“While her passivity soothed him, an exaltation at all times latent in her regard and, so great a part of her passion, likely to spring out at any time, alarmed, irked and often fatigued him. […] Innocence walks with violence; violence is innocent, cold as fate; between the mistress’s kiss and the blade’s is a hairsbreadth only, and no disparity; every door leads to death … The curtain comes down, the book closes – but who is to say that this is not so.”
“; his name was Frank and he felt rather shy and masculine.”
Frank, you must read here about Frank, the most major minor-character ever…
From earlier in this review.
XXIII
“Someone suspiciously like Tim Farquharson, with a young woman in scarlet, slipped out by another door as they came in.”
And like Tim, Frank also appears in this chapter, but not even in person, but just as a name mentioned by Gerda to Lady W to stir the latter’s attention towards her, but, instead, evoking more Gilbert business in Lady W’s busy manipulative brain, when she takes Gerda to see pictures painted by an artist she, Lady W, knew. And this chapter also has aide-memoires about other minor characters and their accoutrements, like Julian’s sister Mrs Dolman (her husband into gas) and the lift between the floors.
But above all this chapter is. an “empty hour” when Julian and Emmeline stumble on each other in the house where she lives with Cecilia, thus reminding us of their erstwhile, and Cecilia’s, rhombus or square with Markie and with each other, and much about the tensions going on within it, and its overwhelming subtleties. OVERWHELMING SUBTLETIES, yes, if that is not a contradiction in terms, deployed disarmingly from Bowen’s head into mine via daily co-vivid dreams co-opted into and from.
Emmeline’s duties, too, to her agency or bureau with a man called Lewis, the strictures of its new secretary and whether she should travel properly instead of staying nearer to home with another famous minor character called Connie Pleach!
“Gerda’s shares with her patroness, just at the moment, seemed rather low: having heard much too much of Cecilia she could not help introducing the subject of Frank. This was a success: Lady Waters, looking into her deeply, said she must put Frank right out of her mind, at least for the present.
‘But he is so sympathetic.’
‘I liked Frank,’ said Lady Waters. ‘But men who are sympathetic are not, alas, always dependable. Julian Tower seems sympathetic but I do not think he is treating Cecilia at all well.’”
“…she felt bound to remind Gerda that her and Gilbert’s relationship was not to each other alone; it was triangular – or, recollecting the number of babies – more strictly, square.”
Emmeline and Julian, meantime….
“She still believed herself happy; untouchable resolution showed even in her lassitude like a mountain-top on a too clear sky.”
Cf Markie’s Alps in the previous chapter.
“But Julian’s was impure: horrified reason played too great a part in it; he could not pack Markie – engaging, rational, witty, intensely social – into the box of one idea and run a sword through. He was not disinterested, being aware of sheer man-to-man envy of Markie for cutting so much ice.”
“When I put cups and saucers away in the office cupboard, it feels as though they had flown there;…”
As with Emmeline’s office cupboard, I sense Bowen’s leitmotifs in my head likewise.
“I [Julian] feel speechless as though I were pulling one foot out after the other across a bog.”
“I don’t think these are my thoughts.”
“…words twist everything; what one agrees about can’t be spoken. To talk is always to quarrel a little, or misunderstand.”
“For a moment he did not answer. Then: ‘You do know,’ he said, ‘that I want to marry Cecilia?’
‘Yes – I do hope she will.’
‘There seems no reason why she should. But Emmeline, if – in the remotest eventuality – what would become of you?’
‘What,’ she said rather wildly, ‘ever becomes of anyone?’”
My reference to a pent-up volcano in the previous entry above now bears full fruition, I guess.
A lot of Bowenesque half-measures, and slow motion feeding of our awareness of Emmeline’s travel business with Peter Lewis, a man thought to be too Peterish! He feared he left the travel office unlocked – and he was right! When I feel anxiety at having left a place unlocked, I am always wrong. —From my review of Chapter IV above.
XXIV
“‘I believe,’ said Emmeline, ‘we forgot to lock up the cottage.’ “
A sense of absurdism in this chapter is left deliberately on the latch — as Stella did when waiting for Harrison’s visit near the start of Heat of the Day?
Here, I wish I had already mentioned Daisy as another major minor-character as she stirs Stendhal’s sense of jealousy in Emmeline, when the latter senses our awareness already of last night’s visit by Daisy to the house with the lift that Markie shares with his sororal Dolman… a visit that starts a telephone squabble, between storeys, by the siblings!
Meantime, M and E are staying at Connie Pleach’s cottage (did not E earlier tell Cecilia that she was going to stay with Connie herself, not go there with M?)
When C’s telegram arrives at the cottage, we learn more about the jealousy radiating within this rhombus of characters, each of each, without the need of someone called Daisy to make it a pentagon!
“A great gilt harp, one of Connie’s heirlooms she could not house in her basement flat, effectively blocked the wall-cupboard beside the grate. A red Recamier couch shed stuffing;”
“Shadows edgeless and soft in the flooding mild light rolled over the face of the downs; close by the window three hollyhocks bore up their spikes of red frilly flowers. Leaning out over the warm sill, Emmeline touched a hollyhock. ‘I say, Markie,’ she called in a minute, ‘there aren’t any stairs.’”
They were in the cupboard.
Cf the cupboard in my previous entry above!
“…he [Markie] had lugged the suitcases over the bumpy threshold with a dreamlike malicious pleasure, as though he were to hear of this happening to someone else …”
“‘Never mind.’ They returned to the parlour, where Emmeline, kneeling, began to puff at the twigs with some wheezy bellows. White ash raced round the hearth; up the chimney Emmeline saw a small patch of sky. Though she discouraged the fire, her air was a wordless magnificat.”
“I’m so tired, Markie; I’d hate to drive any more.’” She is the driver of the car, and she is persuaded by M to get a meal out in Devizes. That’s when they forgot to lock up.
Meanwhile, before they leave, Markie “roamed round to look amiably at the bookshelves, took out a yellow volume, blew dust from the top and returned with it to the sofa, where he swung his feet up, opened the book at random and read aloud:”
And he reads aloud, I infer, parts of CHAPTER XXXV of ‘De LAmour’, a chapter entitled: ‘OF JEALOUSY’ — read aloud in the original French! And it is printed in French in this chapter and perhaps this is the first time a translation of it has been given in the context of this book, a translation I have weasled out from the Internet for inclusion as this cottage’s version of WAIKIKI-pedia!…
When you are in love, as each new object strikes your eye or your
memory, whether crushed in a gallery and patiently listening to a
parliamentary debate, or galloping to the relief of an outpost under
the enemy’s fire, you never fail to add a new perfection to the idea
you have of your mistress, or discover a new means (which at first
seems excellent) of winning her love still more.
Each step the imagination takes is repaid by a moment of sweet delight.
No wonder that existence, such as this, takes hold of one.
Directly jealousy comes into existence, this turn of feelings
continues in itself the same, though the effect it is to produce is
contrary. Each perfection that you add to the crown of your beloved,
who now perhaps loves someone else, far from promising you a heavenly
contentment, thrusts a dagger into your heart. A voice cries out: “This
enchanting pleasure is for my rival to enjoy.”
Even the objects which strike you, without producing this effect,
instead of showing you, as before, a new way of winning her love, cause
you to see a new advantage for your rival.
You meet a pretty woman galloping in the park; your rival is famous
for his fine horses which can do ten miles in fifty minutes.
In this state, rage is easily fanned into life; you no longer
remember that in love possession is nothing, enjoyment everything.
You exaggerate the happiness of your rival, exaggerate the insolence
happiness produces in him, and you come at last to the limit of
tortures, that is to say to the extremest unhappiness, poisoned still
further by a lingering hope.
The only remedy is, perhaps, to observe your rival’s happiness at close
quarters. Often you will see him fall peacefully asleep in the same
salon as the woman, for whom your heart stops beating, —
…which leads us tellingly to the speed versus slowth theme of this book and of Bowen in general.
“‘Stendhal crossed the Alps with an army with a valise strapped on to his horse,’ said Emmeline thoughtfully.
‘Oh, no doubt,’ said Markie, ‘he could have driven a car.’”
A slow journey to this cottage over countrified ruts!
Then the Daisy admission by Markie…
“Daisy walked on some records and said what a nice flat I’d got.’
‘Hadn’t she seen it before?’
‘I suppose she’d forgotten.’”
“‘What did the two men do while she was pathetic?’
‘She stayed back while they were starting the car up, to look for her comb.’
‘Did she find it?’
‘I’ve no idea – no, it’s under my clock.’
‘I wish you hadn’t told me,’ Emmeline said suddenly, raising her eyes to his.
Markie’s eyebrows twitched up. ‘What,’ he said, ‘about Daisy stopping?’
Scarlet at the misapprehension, she said quickly: ‘About her at all.’”
“The other night, what did you mean by the Alps?”
“Come back Sunday must talk very urgent indeed – Cecilia.
Emmeline said: ‘She’s going to marry Julian.’ She stared at the post-office writing, so unlike Cecilia’s, while something slid down in her like a dead weight. Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits, as small houses are broken up daily to widen the roar of London. She saw the door open on emptiness: blanched walls as though after a fire. Houses shared with women are built on sand. She thought: ‘My home, my home.’”
“; those half-shadows behind their talk at Devizes mounting up in him in an impatience ravaging and intense. Damning the bridal Cecilia, he crumpled the paper and threw it into a corner: had they not come here to be alone?”
Did I need all that detail above to summon up such priceless literary absurdism?
XXV
“Yesterday’s unborn pleasure, today’s might-have-been hung about the cottage, picking out the harp, the hearth and the pictures in lines of agony,…”
E v M, still at the cottage panning out in cross purposes of leaving or staying, and vice versa.
E v C, now back home, the Stendhal jealousies magnified, any guilt redoubled, a perfect short chapter …
“First Henry, then you, now Julian.”
Thus, C has more guilt than happiness…
Then, E rings M at his home, then Mrs D his sister in the same home of such separation, and Mrs D puts E onto Daisy’s place.
It all fits INTO place, with sadness and a loss of absurdism as a consolation prize.
All such minor characters come back into the pattern of gestalt as potential hoppiness and / or potential sadness, both now without comedy.
…Except in this chapter we are reminded of another major minor-character…
“Benito appeared from nowhere and ran round her feet.”
Wasn’t he also know as Beelzebub?
XXVI
This chapter is a horror story by Bowen worthy of the author of DEMON LOVER. That happiness-sadness mixtape, though, alongside an absurdism from Pauline’s letter, a letter from her and Dorothea otherwise mainly congratulating Cecilia for her engagement to Uncle Julian….
“You will be pleased to hear that Dorothea and I got ‘Highly commended’ for our garden. If a rabbit had not got in and eaten some of the annuals we might have got the prize,…”
And Lady W is later seen meddling darkly, bringing up Henry in the context of C’s responsibility to E, the E whose travel firm is literally going through a sort of hell in her head, via the auspices of the new secretary that ousted her Tripp.
“Emmeline walked the roads of St John’s Wood or up to Hampstead, quickly, her hands in her pockets. Wet or fine, when rain drew the lamplight out into long reflections, or moths from the sycamores whirled in brown air round the lamps, she walked late; pulling up vaguely at corners or stopping to stare over garden walls.”
“She sat staring at bottles of coloured ink in the pigeon-holes, or turned over dully the letters put out for her to sign: once she signed something she had not read.”
“Everything passed through their secretary’s hands; she had tentacles everywhere; without her, these days, they did not know what they were trying to do.”
A secretary created by Bowen. An Armitage as a byword for elbow?
“…holidays became just one thing more to be undertaken, this end of a gruelling summer.”
Holidays we shall never take again? Staycations Limited, too.
“Broken up like a puzzle the glittering summer lay scattered over her mind, cut into shapes of pain that had no other character.”
Another puzzle for Portia later to solve? Or issue?
The vicar dead, gone away never to become Rip Van Winkle, but simply plain RIP.
“Mr Lewis, however, is quite a minor point.”
XXVII
“He [M] disliked this idea of Cecilia’s, suspecting behind it some shadow of Lady Waters, and had opposed it.”
A morphed, lying shadow, as it turns out, as C (with J) invites M and E together for an archetypal party, more archetypal than Cinderella, E in a silver dress, M reluctant, and yet the chapter ends with their leaving together in E’s car, after E’s brush with Benito. A car with no further ruts to cross, while a ‘plane rustles’.
The invitation to E….
“‘Then,’ said Cecilia, rallying, ‘you really are being foolish. You’re making mountains, beloved. Surely poor Markie’s not worth all that.’
‘Mountains?’ repeated Emmeline, struck by the word. ‘Yes, I do think mountains. You’re certain to have to meet him sometime and somewhere: why not happily here?”
“For a moment she thought she saw in Emmeline’s eyes a wandering icy gentleness like insanity’s, gentleness with no object. But this was as in a dream.”
*
“The drawing-room, heavy and cool in late light with white Chinese peonies, the dining-room, pointed expectant glitter on lakes of polish, reflected her animation.”
“The clock-hands crept round: though Markie did not arrive he was still not late.”
C first met M in Switzerland on a train. Remember? Where the Alps are!
Where did they all first meet?
“Julian said to Cecilia: ‘I wish I’d met you in a train.’
Dropping her voice she said: ‘Why?’ – one of those questions between happy lovers that are never answered but float into speculation.”
“Markie’s quick look, sidelong, examined her [Emmeline’s] fingers’ movement about the stem of the wineglass, ran up her bare arm…”
*
“Were she dead, she could not have come from farther away.”
XXVIII
“‘We’re going north.’ The cold pole’s first magnetism began to tighten upon them…”
One of those chapters in literature you will never forget. But amazingly I had forgotten it! — and it came up anew, with its full force. Towards earlier magnetic north as the ‘Macabre North’ — a pair of words already embedded somewhere in an earlier chapter. The journey north, with M in E’s car, towards where M’s Daisy lives, I guess — all couched in a truly deadly Bowenesque to outdo any horror writer or transcendent writer; even Aickman is squeezed between the crossover or crossdressage of speeds in a car alongside the aloof woods or the aloof clouds of flying from an aerodrome, this time Hendon, not Croydon, toward, I sense, a Mysterious Kôr.
There are passages in this final chapter that reach beyond where any other words have reached. Read them and see. Especially the passages I do NOT quote as a few examples below…
“Petrol pumps red and yellow, veins of all speed and dangerous, leapt giant into their lights.”
“…his fingers, jumping and burning with fresh excitement, tighten about her tense cold wrist as she drove. ‘Mind,’ said Emmeline calmly. ‘How can I drive?’”
“a deep lake of darkness: the aerodrome.”
“My heart sank, I don’t mind telling you, Emmeline. I agree it’s the devil; it may be a pity we ever met. We may be each other’s bad luck, but luck sticks, you know. First you thought too much of me, now you don’t trust me an inch, and you’re right. But here I still am. And you’re something I can’t get past. In a sense, I’m done for.”
“‘As you feel,’ he said and stared at the two lit dials: the clock, the speedometer.”
“Friendly darkness, as over a pillow, and silence in which a clock striking still pinned her to time hung trancelike…”
The Trance of reading Elbow.
Balanced between life and death, Null Immortalis.
And thankfully it all ended with unmixed happiness.
*
“There seems to be no truth anywhere. Even our servants lie.”
end